


Ninety Days Delinquent

by Lauralot



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Repo! The Genetic Opera, Blood and Gore, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, M/M, Organ Theft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 14:26:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5747824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauralot/pseuds/Lauralot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Steve Rogers falls behind on his medical payments, Pierce sends his best man out to repossess Steve's organs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Twenty-First Century Cure

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why I thought a _Repo! The Genetic Opera_ AU was a good idea. But it wouldn't get out of my head, so here you go.

The target’s name was Steve Rogers, and Pierce’s orders were to keep this job contained and quiet. 

He explained why at length, even though he didn’t need to. It was impossible to turn on a television or flip through a magazine without seeing Rogers. He’d been the voice of GeneCo for half a decade now, even more than Alexander Pierce or his children. He headlined the Genetic Opera every night, singing for GeneCo and shilling their wares. 

His voice was the only thing Pierce hadn’t given him. Heart, lungs, liver, all of it belonged to GeneCo. Rogers was their greatest success story. A man crippled by organ failure, slight and sickly and unable to haul himself out of bed to pay for treatments. Until GeneCo had taken pity and rebuilt every inch of him. Then Rogers, now a god of a man, had repaid Pierce’s charity with his angelic voice. 

Except Rogers had been missing for three months now, and all the evidence said he’d vanished deliberately. 

Not that the public knew that. Officially, Rogers had disappeared before a performance with signs of foul play all over his dressing room. Probably, once Rogers was dead, GeneCo would announce finding the body and Pierce, with tears in his eyes, would blame it on violent addicts of street zydrate. On Graverobber Stark. Or so the Repo Man assumed. 

It was not the Repo Man’s place to assume. 

He shook his head. The high from his latest hit of Z was wearing down, leaving him full of aches and thoughts. Pressing the binoculars to his face, the Repo Man gazed across the street. 

He had tracked Rogers to this shitthole apartment yesterday. The problem being that Rogers wasn’t home. But now there was a light. A figure. The Repo Man could only make out a silhouette in the darkness, but it was all he needed. Rogers had a body unlike any other. Almost inhuman. 

The Repo Man hated him. 

Something tugged in his brain when he looked at Rogers, as if a graverobber’s needles were siphoning the Z from his still-living veins. It set him on edge, made his teeth grind. _Keep it contained,_ Pierce had said. _Keep it quiet. But once you have our organs back, make it look messy._

The Repo Man would relish that part. 

He pulled the zydrate gun from his tool belt, smiling faintly behind his mask at the electric blue glow in the vial. It wasn’t enough to numb him completely, to wipe his mind like the doses Pierce allowed between jobs. But he wouldn’t feel a thing in the coming fight. Not a thing. 

The Repo Man pressed the gun to the crook of his elbow and fired through his jacket. A burn, a gasp, as the Z raced through his veins. And then nothing. 

One last glance through his binoculars. Rogers was lying on a bed. That would make things easier, if only he’d stay there. 

*

Rogers didn’t stir when the Repo Man kicked open the door. He lay flat on the bed, hands at his sides. As though he were a corpse already. 

“Steven Rogers,” the Repo Man said, and only then did the man turn his head. Sharply, his pale blue eyes—GeneCo’s eyes—boring into the Repo Man’s goggles. “You have not paid your debts. GeneCo has come to collect their property.” 

“Who are you?” Rogers demanded. “Take off that mask.” 

“I am the fist of GeneCo.” The Repo Man grasped a scalpel in his right hand and a taser in his left. Rogers had nowhere to go. “Anything else is irrelevant.”

“I know you.” Rogers sounded choked. 

The Repo Man ignored him, crossing the room in strides. He reached the bed, readying the taser. 

Then something stabbed into his leg. 

The Repo Man looked down. There was a hand peeking out from under the mattress, wrapped around a syringe. The syringe was sticking out of the Repo Man’s leg. 

“Got him!” The person under the bed crowed as Rogers rolled out of the Repo Man’s reach. “Thank _fuck,_ I haven’t moved in almost two days, and I’ve gotta piss like a race—”

Hands closed on the Repo Man’s arms. They were dark, broad, and the Repo Man was powerless against them. Whatever the syringe had held was racing through his blood, dulling his reflexes. He blinked slowly, exhausted, as though he were the one about to be cut open. 

Rogers was rushing at him now, and the Repo Man’s limbs felt weighted. He couldn’t move to defend himself, couldn’t keep Rogers from tugging at his mask.

“Bucky,” Rogers gasped. The mask fell to the floor by the Repo Man’s boots. The syringe was still sticking out of his leg. _They should have removed it,_ the Repo Man thought. _That’s sloppy procedure, the needle could break off._

“Bucky,” Rogers repeated. He was crying. 

“Who the hell is Bucky?” the Repo Man slurred, and then he slept. 


	2. Zydrate Anatomy

The Repo Man was strapped down.

His mask was gone, skin flushed and wet with perspiration, body aching. His belt was gone. His zydrate gun was _gone._

The Repo Man struggled, but the bonds would not give way. The surface beneath him shook. A gurney. They’d strapped him to a gurney, and now they would cut him open as he’d done to so many others.

There was a face above the Repo Man. He had a beard, a smile. Skin that looked as though it had once been tan. But this man hadn’t seen the sun in years. The Repo Man recognized his face from the news broadcasts and police bulletins.

Graverobber Stark.

The Repo Man snarled, tugging at his bonds with renewed fury.

“I was gonna ask if you could play nice if I let you go,” Stark said. “But I take it you need a little more time in the calm down corner.”

“You’re a monster,” the Repo Man shouted.

“Funny, coming from the man who cuts people up to pay for his fix.”

“Repossessions are legal!” The gurney shook violently, threatening to tip. “You desecrate the dead to stock your wares!”

Stark laughed. He was wearing a leather coat with a fur trim. The Repo Man’s blood boiled. How many bodies had he mutilated to pay for his wardrobe?

“Bucky!” There were hands stroking at his fevered face. Rogers stared down at him. “ _God,_ Bucky, I thought I’d never see you again. They told me you were dead.”

The Repo Man bit him. Blood splattered across his cheek, and Rogers howled.

Rogers stumbled back as the Repo Man spat blood and tissue in Stark’s direction.

“If you’re going to kill me, do it!”

“Whoa, Old Yeller,” Stark said. “Nobody’s gonna kill you. Nobody here, anyway. The amount of zydrate in your blood? You’ll be dead in a year the way Pierce has you going.”

Pierce would never let him die. The Repo Man was too valuable. He’d replace the failing organs, and the Repo Man would work it off.

“We’re going to help you, Bucky.” Rogers had gauze pressed against his hand now. There were tears down his face. “Don’t you remember me?”

“Judging by his blood work,” said someone out of sight, “he doesn’t remember his own name.” A dark man stepped into view. He had scarring around one eye where it had been replaced. Nick Fury. Another Repo Man.

Pierce had sent him to find Rogers when Rogers first vanished. Fury had never returned.

“ _Traitor!_ ” the Repo Man shouted.

Fury rolled his eyes. “For fuck’s sake, give him a hit so he’ll shut up.”

Stark waved a zydrate gun in the Repo Man’s face, and to his shame, the Repo Man went still.

“I’m gonna have to give you this,” Stark said. “There’s no way you’d survive going cold turkey. We’ll have to cut you down gradually. But before I get you wasted, you need to listen. I’m no graverobber. That’s a lie GeneCo put out to discredit me. Same reason they tore apart my company.”

GeneCo had nothing to do with the fall of Stark Industries. Stark’s own idiotic decisions had done that. The Repo Man growled, tugging at his bonds again.

“Listen to him, Bucky,” Rogers pleaded. “Please.”

“I’m the one who invented the synthetic organs after the plague hit,” Stark continued. “I was going to give them to anyone who was sick for free. But Pierce stole my research. Promised my board a cut of the profits, and took all my resources away. He passed my work off as his own idea and forced the bill into law to legalize repossessions. Then he made me out as a graverobber.”

A lie. It had to be a lie. The Repo Man shook his head, but that sent the world spinning. He needed another hit. He needed it now.

“I make my own zydrate,” Stark said. “I don’t take it from corpses. And what I make is a hell of a lot better on the body than the shit GeneCo uses for its surgeries. Why do you think Sinthea Pierce prefers my stuff to her dad’s?”

“Her name is Amber Sweet.” The Repo Man had met her before. She was insistent on being addressed by her stage name. She became very angry when people didn’t listen, and then the Repo Man would have to retaliate for her.

“Listen to me, Barnes. You know Pierce. You’ve seen the things he authorizes, what he allows his kids to do. You really think he has the public’s best interests at heart?”

Pierce had two sons. Jack had a foul temper and a tendency to stab anyone within reach if he was angry. Or just if he wanted. Brock loved people, or at least their bodies. He loved them enough to take them to bed and keep their faces afterward as keepsakes. He liked to wear them. And Amber only cared about the spotlight.

“Pierce framed me for Maria Hill’s murder,” Fury said. “She was my partner. We were investigating into GeneCo together. Their organs are made to fail, to force people back into surgeries. But Pierce caught wind of what we were doing. He killed Maria. Set it up to look like I did it, and made me work for him to stay out of jail. He must have done something like that to you.”

“He used me,” Rogers said. There were still tears shimmering in his eyes. “Bucky, you’re my best friend. You used to be a Gentern before Pierce made you into this. You were the one who convinced him to give me the surgeries. We couldn’t afford it, but you had me sing for Pierce.”

Rogers came back to the gurney, squeezing the Repo Man’s hand. “After I woke up, Pierce told me you’d given up life to pay for mine. That my debts were still too much, and if I didn’t sing for him and pay them off, I’d be spitting on your memory. He must have told you that you had to do repo jobs for him to keep me alive.”

“And then he got you hooked to be sure you’d stay in line,” Stark added.

“We can help you, Buck,” Rogers insisted. “We can take down GeneCo once and for all. Please, I don’t want to lose you again.”

“I don’t know you,” the Repo Man said. His head was swimming.

“You will.”

And then Rogers’s eyes were glowing. Projecting. The Repo Man knew that GeneCo had replaced them because Rogers had been colorblind. He hadn’t realized that Rogers had the Cornea Plus implants, converting his memories to digital records.

The recording flickered to life, and the Repo Man saw his own face staring down at him.

His hair was shorter. His cheeks fuller. He wore a red visor, like a Gentern.

“Steve,” said the recording. A hand reached out as if to stroke the Repo Man’s face. “Steve, hang in there. You’re gonna be okay, I promise. I’ll find a way to get you the parts you need. I’ll never leave you.”

The recording stopped. Rogers was blinking away tears again.

“We’re going to help you,” he told the Repo Man.

“First,” Stark added, “we need to get you prepped for a little surgery.”

Then Stark fired the zydrate gun against the Repo Man’s thigh, and the room went dark.


	3. At the Opera Tonight

The stage floor was soaked in blood.

More than blood. Some of Pierce’s intestines had come out when the Repo Man stabbed him.

They were going to leave Pierce’s children alive. At least, that had been the plan. But Jack and Brock hadn’t taken the sight of their father bleeding out well, and had rushed the stage. Fury blew Jack’s head off. Rogers had shot Brock in the gut. Amber was the only child smart enough to stay backstage.

It was quite the spectacle. Some people had cheered. The Repo Man didn’t know if that was because they hated GeneCo, or because they thought it was part of the opera.

Stark cleared that up quickly enough when he took the stage. He had the Cornea Plus implants as well. They all did now, even the Repo Man.

“Where did you get the corneas?” he’d asked Stark, once he woke up from the surgery.

“Corpses,” Stark had answered.

“So you’re a graverobber after all.”

“Hey,” Stark had said. “When you have to replace your own corneas on the run, then you can criticize my methods.”

A few days later, desperate for a hit of Z, the Repo Man had come to Tony’s room as Tony was stepping out of the shower. His chest was badly scarred. Had he replaced his own heart? Was that possible?

The plan had gone off without a hitch. One of the opera singers, a friend of Rogers’s named Pepper Potts, had snuck them inside. Fury, the Repo Man, Stark, and another friend of Stark’s named Rhodes had waited in the wings with guns and knives to stop anyone from interrupting as Rogers took the stage.

He hadn’t sung. Instead, his eyes had projected memories. And because the Genetic Opera was broadcast live, the whole world had seen them. Pierce ordering Rogers to back products that he knew were worthless. Pierce telling him to endorse payment plans designed to screw over the customers. Pierce, shouting at Rogers while he was crying over the supposed death of Bucky Barnes, demanding that he get up and perform.

That was when Pierce had tried to stop the show. That was when the Repo Man had eviscerated him.

Once Stark had the crowd settled, he played his own memories. Pierce smirking and telling Stark that there was nothing he could do to keep GeneCo from destroying Stark Industries and taking Stark’s transplant technology. Pierce saying that he was going to bury Stark and make the world hate him.

Stark announced that he would be rebuilding his company if the public would help him. He would provide higher quality transplants for free, and there would never be repossessions.

It had taken nearly an hour for the cheering to stop after that.

Fury took the stage after Stark’s speech. He played his memories, showing the world that Pierce had framed him for Hill’s murder and smirked as he forced Fury into his service.

The Repo Man went last. His first memory was Pierce ordering the repossession on Rogers. “Make it messy,” Pierce said. “Don’t make it look like a repo.”

There were more memories after that. He’d been away from GeneCo for weeks now, with a slightly lower amount of Z in his body every day. It was easier to remember, even if it meant feeling things he only wanted to block out.

Pierce had ordered early repos on GeneCo patients protesting against organ repossession. He’d told the Repo Man to kill political rivals without taking any organs at all. As the Repo Man played the memories, the crowd began to murmur and shout with anger.

Frightened, the Repo Man stopped. He turned to face the others, to make sure the anger wasn’t directed at them.

Rogers smiled at him.

Rogers smiled, and the Repo Man _remembered._

He turned away, flushing, the memory burning out of his eyes. He projected Steve, lying on a bed and coughing violently. “I don’t know why you put up with me,” Steve said.

His own voice in reply. “Because I love you, you moron. You’re not getting rid of me that easy.”

Steve smiled. Then coughed. Then smiled again. “To the end of the line, Buck?”

“To the end of the line.”

The memory faded. Bucky blinked, turning to Steve. He ran over, nearly slipping in Pierce’s blood, and he threw his arms around Steve, kissing him. He could feel Steve’s lips against his own, his hands on Bucky’s back, and it was a million times better than a hit of Z.

The crowd applauded.


End file.
